Essence Design in design week - the lowdown of a controversy

So, here comes the story of my last encounter with journalism and the ups and downs of PR. As usual, we had an idea. It seemed a good one as well, exciting and a bit different. Following the recent dip in the economy, and the fact that a lot of our potential customers have seen their marketing budgets cut, we thought it may be quite nice to do a bit of a publicity stunt and auction off a service of ours a month. Makes 12 happy clients over a year and hopefully some good PR for us. So how do you start? You write a press release. Once that states your idea and intentions and helps a journalist write about it. And this is the content:

To: Editor
From: Regine Wilber, Essence Design Limited
Date: 19th February 2009
Embargo: 10th March

A Bid for Better Design
It's amazing in times of economic downturn how marketing budgets are the first thing to fly out the window and how quality usually gets abandoned for budget design and print options.

One often hears, especially in the current business climate, that the company’s website, despite being a pain to update and looking dated, will do for another year as not much is coming through it anyway. The brand may look a bit tired but the old folders and inserts will do for now - and exhibitions are really too expensive, so it's best not to also spend money
on a new stand design...

Despite this phenomenon hitting mainly SMEs, larger companies also increasingly finding their budgets cut and are told to resume to inhouse solutions by inhouse staff (who are in most cases not trained professional designers but overworked marketeers trying to fit all this extra work into an already busy schedule).

Hey presto, here is an interesting possibility for those companies that would love to do marketing the professional way but simply don't feel they can afford it: Bid for it!

A Birmingham design agency has taken the initiative to offer their professional services to the highest bidder - be it a fully bespoke, content managed website, a new brand, the design of a catalogue or brochure, an exhibition stand design. Companies interested can simply go to the website www.essence-design.co.uk/bidfordesign and enter their highest
bid - ebay style – to potentially see themselves getting agency expertise at a bargain price.

Succesfull business owners know that marketing must not stand abandoned in the corner when economic times are challenging, so this is an easy, fun and exciting way to cut costs in the short term - without losing quality. It seems like a bid of a good idea.

--- The End

And, following some conversation with the industry magazine design week, we got an article published. Here is the link to the design week article.

I hope the journalist does not mind me saying that the interpretation of our press release was somewhat different than expected, as was the ensuing reaction from fellow design professionals.

The DBA, who strongly objected to the idea, is an organisation that has apparently been preaching about keeping fees high in the design industry for the past 15 years, which is lovely, but they should consider their communication strategy as we never really heard that they are doing anything on our behalf - consider this my own snipey reprise I am indulging in since this is our own blog.

Similarly, the other comments were very polarised - and subsequently got people in the office worried, of course, about our reputation and potential damage to it. So, after long discussions covering all the pros and cons we decided to drop the idea for now, looking perhaps at a different angle, and just finishing the debate with a comment:

"Ooops indeed! It is funny how sometimes you can get too excited and close to an idea to see all sides. Certainly the above comments made us think and there has been a heated debate in the office. I guess we naively thought that this would be an opportunity for a handful of businesses who may find it hard to raise the money to pay for bespoke, high quality design and to give something back to struggling companies who see their hands tied with marketing budgets being cut - but both the article and the comments paint a much more negative picture which we did not anticipate at all. (Neither did we imagine someone would read into this that we don't know our market value, but this is by the by...) So, consider this a dead duck in the water before we launch it and call us humble, older and wiser both regarding how articles can be interpreted and how easy it is to potentially damage reputation. Thanks for the feedback!"

However, even after submitting it three times it never appeared. Had design week - and the whole world - ganged up on us?
I called the editor who was very friendly and explained that they wanted to run an additional article with the responses, giving us more of a platform to explain our reasoning. We discussed some of our thoughts regarding the comments that were made:

We are admittedly not a cheap design agency; we tend to work with companies who have an understanding of the value of working with experienced professionals - and the subsequent costs involved in the design, print and development process.

Compare this to a 4 or 5 star hotel, if one of them decided to auction off a small number of rooms, that does not suddenly make them a budget hotel!  Equally, visitors of the hotel who had stayed there at the standard RAC rate will not think less of the hotel because someone may stay there for less... but rather think 'oh, lucky them' or perhaps even 'oh, I will bid myself!'.

To question whether we know our market rate or that the above press release 'admitted' we don't know our own market rate is a very over reacted conclusion in my mind.

Fellow designers and marketeers, it was to be a bit of fun!
And if a toilet company had won a re-brand, well hey, perhaps we would do such a good job, it would be worth shouting about it!
What's wrong with toilet companies anyway? Are they sub standard and not worth our dedication as communication professionals? The other thing that astounded me was that everybody seemed to assume the auctions would end up with services being sold for next to nothing - it is however an auction and who knows how it could have panned out.

Following the second article, which appeared a few days later, I actually got a phone call from a designer from an agency who wanted to show his support and we had a nice conversation about organisations who think very highly of themselves and are incapable to accept change. It was lovely getting some positive feedback - and I am positively surprised that the latest comment actually made it through the editing panel - but I am well pleased it did! Read the article in design week and the comment here.